20140810.0740

I sometimes sleep in...

The term does not start tomorrow, but orientation activities for it do, and I must attend them. I have managed to get them scheduled such that I am not on for the full, long haul; I will still be breaking off to take care of Ms. 8 while her mother works. It should still be okay, though. I have taught one of the two courses assigned me before, and the other is a literature class that I ought to be able to teach without trouble. The paperwork ought to be easily enough done, and next Sunday morning, I will be staring down the last day before the term begins. If things go as they ought to go, I will be resting up, possibly sleeping in again, and enjoying a last day with family before the work of the classroom begins once again in earnest.

I say "in earnest" because it never really stops, even if the intensity diminishes somewhat. While I had no classes to teach this summer, others did, and even I spent much time doing the kind of work that I will expect my students to do. The freelancing and conference travel thus serve to keep me embedded in classroom practice in addition to offering me more money and opportunities to meet new people. The ongoing reading, which has admittedly not continued as I would have preferred it to do, has also helped equip me for continued work. I study and conduct research so that I can better learn my materials, theoretically equipping me to teach more and better. (But not more better. That's a whole different thing.)

That many do not believe such things is obvious. Protestations that teachers "get summers off" and that professors bury themselves in esoteric research that nobody outside their narrow fields will read--if even those within them will do so--abound. The former, of course, rankles particularly when motions are made to switch to year-round schooling and are shouted down. Can a person be blamed for "not working" when there is not work to do? Not that teachers are "not working" over the summers...And as to the latter, there is this, as well as another post or two that I cannot seem to find at the moment but which I recall arguing that because we do not fault physicians for writing to other physicians we ought not to fault academics from writing to other academics.

But while the beliefs of many are demonstrably wrong, they remain in force and in place. They are resistant to change; those who hold them are often unwilling or unable to set them aside in the face of new evidence. That evidence is usually condemned as irrelevant or merely anecdotal (even as irrelevant or merely anecdotal evidence is used to bolster wrong-headed ideas--or circular reasoning is). The fight against wrong must still be fought, however, even if it appears as if it is against Surtr or Fenrir at the end of the Fimbulwinter and those who fight it stand in place of the Æsir...